Month: April 2015

Dr Kevin Marshall is the Head of Education in Microsoft Ireland. Kevin is down at the conference today to monitor and see the real life implementations of ePortfolio and see how far it can go in education. Dr Marshall shared his views on ePortfolio and also explained his role in Microsoft. He then spoke about Microsoft’s involvement in EUfolio.

Dr. Klaus is an academic staff member at the University of Teacher Education Vienna. He has been involved in ePortfolio since the very beginning but he had to quit since he was moving and he is grateful to see that the project has moved into the international stage. Dr. Klaus is a lecturer in the University of Teacher Education in Vienna and is looking forward to ePortfolio to be used in schools.

John Hurley is one of the backroom team of today’s event. John works in H2 Learning which is based in Dublin. He has been involved in EUfolio since the beginning and is very excited to see it all come together. John is a former teacher and is very keen in seeing EUfolio used widely in schools.

Anastasia Economou was one of the speakers on the morning panel on ePortfolios in Education at the EUfolio conference.

Anastasia is part of the EUfolio team in Cyprus. We asked her about her involvement in the making of the teacher material pack. She explained that her team was responsible for designing a lot of the training materials for the project and helped also with the project evaluation. It was interesting to hear how Anastasia and her team went about constructing the resource packs . Anastasia also spoke about the importance of technology and in particular ePortfolio.

The EUfolio conference opening keynote was given by Prof. Val Klenowski who is Professor of Education at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. She has also worked at the Hong Kong Institute of Education and at the Institute of Education, University of London. Prof Klenowski has also been an academic advisor to the Director General of Education Queensland and is currently engaged in research with the Queensland Educational Leadership Institute (QELI).

When we interviewed her, Professor Klenowski spoke about the ideas in her keynote and also her experience and views on ePortfolios generally. She also spoke about her work and research and gave us an insight into her books on assessment and portfolios and how technology has allowed us to improve learning and education . The professor also explained how ePortfolios stimulate and create enthusiasm in students and why it’s vital to introduce technology to education.

We are here at EUfolio at Dublin Castle – there are people here from all over Europe. We will be interviewing several of the speakers from the event, so stay tuned for those.

The idea behind the EUfolio conference is to provide practical examples, implementation steps and advice on how best to introduce and implement ePortfolios in schools. It is an initiative of the Department of Education and Skills here in Ireland and has been managed by an ICT group called H2 learning.

So…what is an ePortfolio? We aren’t that sure just yet! But basically, it seems an electronic portfolio is a collection of electronic evidence assembled and managed by a student online.

An ePortfolio is an online reflective journal of students’ studies, achievements and success which can be used for evaluation and self-reflection. We are here to find out and to tell you more about this ePortfolio. We are hoping to talk to participants to learn more.